Update 2018-09-17: The Udemy links in this article are broken. It appears the course is no longer available. Good thing I still have my Course Guide, which you can download at the end of this article!
Using Active voice makes your communication shorter, clearer, and more engaging. We all communicate, whether writing emails or talking to coworkers and managers in meetings.
Slipping into the habit of using passive voice is terribly easy. Everyone around us communicates this way! How do we get better?
Chris Straley provides this free 40-minute course on Udemy!
The goals of the course are to:
- Identify passive voice and determine the differences between passive and active voice,
- Learn the benefits of active voice,
- Gain practice converting passive to active voice through examples and quizzes.
How to Identify Passive Voice
We want to start using active voice. The first thing is to spot the differences between active and passive voice.
In passive voice, the subject is passively acted upon. Hence passive voice!
Passive voice uses some form of the verb “to be”. Just remember that not every instance of “to be” means passive voice. It is generally bad to start sentences with a “to be” word. Like I just did with that sentence! In fact, Straley says, we should avoid “is” and other “to be” words as much as possible.
“To be” verbs are weak, because they convey no action. Verbs like “is”, “are”, “was”, and “be” all suggest a state of being. In passive voice, that means being acted upon.
But is passive voice really a bad thing?
Passive Voice is Weak, Wordy, and Not Descriptive
Passive voice disconnects the action from the subject performing the action. This kind of writing is less exciting. It bores your readers and increases the likelihood that they will zone out, or quit reading altogether.
Passive voice also fails to describe what is happening. “The ball was thrown by Bryan” is a report about what happened to the ball. It does not describe or convey the action. “Bryan threw the ball.” You cannot help but picture that scene! It is brief and clear.
Passive voice also tends to be wordy. People accuse me of this issue all the time! In the example above, the passive voice version was six words, compared to only four words in active voice.
Active Voice is Shorter, Clearer, and Paints a Picture
Active voice, as in the example above, is shorter and clearer. Your readers are busy, so this brevity is important. They will appreciate anything you can do to reduce the number of words necessary to convey your message.
Aside: Clarity is also one of the main principles in The Secret Sauce of Great Writing, another free Udemy course I enjoyed.
Active voice is also more descriptive. It paints a picture for your reader. When readers summon mental images of what is going on, they become more invested in the reading, more connected, and more engaged.
Should You Ever Use Passive Voice?
Sometimes you might want to disconnect the subject from the action. Politicians do this all the time. “Mistakes were made.” Straley discusses this example in the course.
As another example, suppose you deliver one of your projects a day late because someone on your team forgot to write a report. You cannot ignore the issue, so you pull that team member aside and talk about it in private. But in public, you want to protect your team, so you tell your manager “The report was delivered late, so the project is one day late. We are taking corrective steps to prevent this from happening again.”
The use of passive voice can “soften the blow” by putting distance between the subject and the action. Though sometimes useful, we generally want to avoid passive voice.
How to Rewrite Passive Voice to Active Voice
We know Passive voice is usually not good. We know we should use Active voice. We know how to identify sentences using passive voice. Now what? How do we start using Active voice?
First, change the subject. Since the subject is the thing being acted upon in passive voice, find who or what is performing that action and make that the subject.
Next, replace the weak “to be” verb with an action verb. Now the subject is performing the action.
Follow these guidelines and your writing will come alive!
Download the course guide below to see all my notes. If you do any writing or communicating at all, I encourage you to take this course. It is free and will take less than one hour.
Footnote: I wrote 20% of the sentences with passive voice in the first draft of this article, according to Yoast SEO’s readability analysis. Following the guidelines I learned in this course, I reduced that to 10%. That makes my day 🙂
